Locker-Room Lucre and the Siren Song of Entitlement

By HARVEY ARATON

Published: March 17, 2002

LIKE most people last week who heard the sad tale of the reserve New York Yankees outfielder who admitted to stealing a game glove and bat from the star shortstop Derek Jeter in the team's spring training clubhouse, Barry Halper couldn't believe it at first. Why would Ruben Rivera risk and eventually forfeit $800,000 in salary for the $2,500 he was handed by a memorabilia dealer for the pilfered gear?

Then Halper, a longtime collector with close business and personal ties to baseball, recalled the time a player more famous and better paid than Rivera made him an offer that, while not criminal, was nearly as confounding.

''Roberto Alomar calls and says he's interested in selling me a World Series trophy he had from when he was in Toronto,'' Halper said. With similar items in his collection, Halper didn't bite, but the subject of Alomar's trophy sale arose later in a conversation with Paul Beeston, a Blue Jays executive. ''Paul was dumbfounded,'' Halper said. ''He said, 'Why the heck would he want to sell that? We gave that to him.' ''

As Halper told Beeston, players who earn millions often sell personal and prideful keepsakes for what amounts to petty cash. One explanation for last week's thievery might be that Rivera, a Panamanian and the cousin of the Yankees' relief ace Mariano Rivera, has never felt economically elevated, like many athletes raised poor. An alternate and more likely motivation for the behavior, which Rivera said he deeply regrets (he returned the items before being cut), is that big-league ballplayers and most professional athletes operate in a vacuum of entitlement.

Rivera may not have achieved the stardom once forecast for him, but he is a major leaguer and therefore an unqualified success story and hero back home. And in America's distorted and inflated sports consumer culture, even failed prodigies who become journeymen can expect people to line up and pay for their autographs. The typical pro career is relatively brief, but an active athlete can expect a life of largesse, be it from those willing to pay for a piece of them or those merely wanting to touch them. In a variety of ways and on too many documented occasions, athletes on all levels lose their sense of propriety in a moment of craving.

While many agents and assorted outsiders have swindled athletes, rare are the reported cases of players stealing from one another. Legend has it that Leo Durocher, as a young Yankee infielder, took money or a wristwatch from Babe Ruth. Durocher, the story goes, was not only banished but given a Ruthian beating to boot.

Clubhouse theft might have been more understandable when the average player didn't make enough money to support his family year-round, except there was little to take that could be traded for cash. Halper, for instance, once asked Joe DiMaggio, a good friend, what he did with the bat he used during his record 56-game hitting streak. DiMaggio said he gave it to Lou Costello. Yes, that Costello, Abbott's comic co-conspirator.

Locker-room theft isn't limited to baseball. Last year the brother of Pat Croce, president of the N.B.A.'s Philadelphia 76ers, was caught on videotape stealing cash from the pants pocket of the team's superstar, Allen Iverson. Marty Appel, a former Yankees public relations executive, said monetary theft has never been an issue in baseball clubhouses, which usually have lockboxes for players' valuables.

Appel recalled that the lockbox in the prerenovated Yankee Stadium in the mid-1970's was the original one from the New York Highlanders of the early 20th century. ''It actually had the players' names inscribed on the boxes -- Jack Chesbro, Wee Willie Keeler,'' Appel said. ''I remember telling Pete Sheehy, the old clubhouse guy, that they had to somehow save it. Of course, they didn't.''

How unfortunate. Imagine what it would have fetched today, once surreptitiously removed from the premises.